>This is the first attempt at describing the new Hive3 syntax. It's simplified.
>
>The types of content words are the adjectives, which are univalent, and verbs, which are bivalent. Adjectives include words like "hot", "angry", "run", and "cat" while verbs include words like "see", "give", "in", and "mother". Other word types are quantity words, determiners, pronouns, hive person identifiers (0 - 3), conjunctions, and other particles. There can also be arbitrary names.
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>A verb can be derived from an adjective using a valence-increase affix and an adjective can be derived from a verb using a valence-decrease affix. Verb-inversion may also be involved.
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>Sentences are made up of clauses, which are made up of phrases, predicates, and subordinate clauses.
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>A predicate begins with a hive id (plus an optional name). A predicate plus any number of adjectives is also a predicate. The adjectives successively restrict the set of entities represented by the predicate, e.g. 1 cat black hungry. A predicate becomes a phrase when a determiner is appended (which may be preceded by a quantity word), e.g. 1 cat black hungry "1" IND -- "a hungry black cat." A pronoun also constitutes a phrase. When a verb is appended to a phrase, a predicate is produced, with the phrase representing the argument to the relation represented by the verb. The resulting predicate represents the outcome of that relation.
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>Without getting into the details, compound predicates and compound phrases are both possible.
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>A typical clause consists of a predicate followed by a phrase, e.g. 1 hungry 1 cat black "1" DEF -- "The black cat is hungry." (I'm not sure if the initial hive id is needed for every predicate.)
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>A clause may instead consist of 2 phrases, for definition or identity (depending on the determiners).
>
>--
>Jeff

In Hive3, there's no genitive case (or cases in general). Instead, a variety of verbs are used.

Kinship terms are verbs, semantically as well as syntactically. Body part terms are also syntactical verbs, even though they select parts of the preceding phrase's referent. Most other noun-like words are adjectives. The partitive verb and the copula, which so far are used only after pronouns, also select parts of the pronoun's referent. The difference between these is that the partitive produces a subset whose cardinality is specified by the following quantity word (required in this case) while with the copula, the quantity word (also required) specifies the cardinality of the pronoun. E.g. N1 PAR "5" IND "5 of us" vs N1 COP "5" DEF "we who number 5".

*** I may change the syntax so that the copula is used for identity clauses, or make the copula null in all cases. Either way, there has to be a copula so that the negative polarity prefix has something to attach to. ***

There are a number of other "possessive" verbs. One means "the possessor is responsible for and takes care of the possessum" and another means "the possessum is allocated for the possessor's consumption". I need to figure out what the others are.

These are all singular unless modified by PAR or COP, in which case, they're exclusive plural. Currently, inclusive plural requires a conjunction, which is awkward.

For 3rd person pronouns, there are CENT, coreferencing the central argument of the preceding clause, and PERI, coreferencing the peripheral argument, where the clause is peripheral-phrase verb central-phrase. This is inadequate, since a compound predicate may have multiple peripheral phrases, and possibly for other reasons.

For named entities, the classifying adjective preceding the name might be used pronominally, e.g. 0 person1 "John Smith" IND might be abbreviated as 0 person1 DEF subsequently.